Craft 1/9

I finished my first craft project today. I know, it's the 28th, so I was cutting it close on the one per month deadline, but I did finish it. How many of you have lasted this long on your new year's resolutions, hmmm? 

To preface this project, I want to explain my reasoning behind it. The hubs and I have been together for a ridiculously long time, considering how old we are. To put this into perspective, we have been together 60 times longer than Kim Kardashian was married to...well, who really remembers his name, 486 times longer than Dennis Rodman was married to Carmen Electra, and 1,911 times longer than Britney Spears and the guy named after George from Seinfeld were married. 

Anyways, for those of you who are not aware, when you are together for longer than a celebrity marriage, you start to get comfortable with each other, and you stop shaving your legs every time you will see him, or start letting her pluck your eyebrows. This is great! You have made it past the eggshell stage, the "I just want them to be happy" stage, the "Of course I wake up looking this good" stage, to the "this is who we really are" stage. At this point, you can truly connect with each other...over the same dinner at the same restaurant, at the same time each week. That's right. Unfortunately, when you are SO comfortable with each other, life happens, and you get married and you both decide to go to school and get your masters AT THE SAME TIME and you work and you pay bills and you do homework and you pay bills, and you attend classes and do research and work some more, and you sleep sometimes and two years into your graduate programs, you realize that you can't remember the last time you went on a proper date that didn't involve sweat pants or cactus legs. (Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration...a couple of months ago we went out and it was great, and I am pretty sure he shaved his legs for the occasion, but that doesn't flow very well with my point, which is that sometimes, when you have been together long enough, your dates start to look remarkably similar.) 

So, how do you improve your (already admittedly pretty awesome) marriage? You can use the Better Marriage Blanket...

Or you can do an easy, cheap craft. I think we both know what the obvious choice is. 

Unfortunately, the marriage blanket is a bit expensive for me ($120!?!?!?!?), so I chose the craft. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the Better Marriage Date Night Jar Thingy:

So simple, so easy!

Are you tired of going through the same question on date night? 

Never fear, fellow decision avoiders! I have just the thing to solve your marriage-date woes!

All you need are colored popsicle sticks ($3 at Hobby Lobby) and a jar ($2 and some change at Hobby Lobby).  You should probably also have internet access, or a healthy dose of creativity. Me? I have the internet creativity, of course! 

Now that you have the required materials, all you need to do is use the internet your mind to come up with all kinds of exciting date ideas and write them on the popsicle sticks! I separated mine based on the color of popsicle stick. 

Orange popsicle sticks are free dates. For these, I have things like board game night, racquetball (free at our school, since we're students), a Wii sports tournament, and a blanket fort/popcorn/movie night.

Yellow sticks have dates that require little planning and are under $20. Some of the things I have listed on these are "driving range," "arcade," or "minor league baseball game." I also have one that requires us to go to a flea market, split up, and find a gift for each other under $10, and one of my favorites is the Bookstore Challenge, which I am extremely excited about. 

Red popsicle sticks list dates that require a little more planning, and/or will probably cost more than $20. These include things like a dinner cruise, going canoeing, and a progressive dinner, in which we get an appetizer, entree, dessert, and drinks from 4 separate restaurants. 

My hubs and I love to travel, so of course I had to include travel dates. Green sticks are for trips that require a full day, but little money aside from travel expenses. Some of these include a hiking trip in Arkansas, a trip to Eureka Springs,  and free activities in St. Louis, like the zoo, Science Center, and Grant's Farm. 

Blue sticks are travel dates that require (1) more money, (2) more time, or (3) more planning. These include things like going to an amusement park, camping, or my personal favorite, a nowhere trip, where you pick a random direction and drive until you want to stop. 

Finally, I only had two purple sticks in the entire pack, so I put one of our names on each stick. If we choose to draw a purple stick, that person has to plan an entire date on their own so the other person can be surprised. 

I am so excited to use this that I am having trouble waiting to draw a stick until this weekend, and I was pleasantly surprised by how many of the dates that the hubs showed interest in. Hence, I think that this project was a great use of my time, even though I probably should have been finishing my neuropsych summary. Oh well, carpe diem (That's YOLO in smart-people talk)! 

(Although I am so Pinterest savvy creative, I did not come up with this on my own. See here for the original project.)